The Cupertino Courier

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Bryan McCann, front, and Warren Rick participate in a teamwork exercise during Fremont High School's MOSAIC class, which brings students from a variety of backgrounds together to learn about leadership.

Class Conscious

MOSAIC confronts stereotypes and breaks them down

By Justin Berton

In the cafeteria of Fremont High School on a Saturday afternoon, 26 students and a few teachers are playing a simple game of what might be titled "Guess Your Race."

Tully Banta-Cain, the 18-year-old impromptu MC of the game, brings the students forward one at a time for the contestants to get a good look.

"For the grand prize," Tully says as he puts an arm around the final student in the game, "who can guess this woman's ethnicity?"

The students, who are sitting in a horseshoe of gray folding chairs around Tully and the girl, are mostly silent with puzzlement.

Sensing an easy victory over the students, Tully challenges his teacher.

"How 'bout you, Ms. Frankowski?" he asks.

Sofi Frankowski, the co-teacher of the class, looks the girl up and down.

"I'd say half Persian ... and half white," she says.

Tully and the girl look astonished as they slowly nod their heads.

Most teachers don't openly guess their students' ethnicity. Then again, most students aren't enrolled in MOSAIC, a unique leadership class that asks its students to recognize their differences to appreciate their likenesses.

Exercises like these, Frankowski explained, teach students "to challenge the assumptions about one another."

MOSAIC, Making Our School an Inclusive Community, aims to bring students who are leaders together with those who aren't, to make their campus a unified community. Through workshops and weekend retreats, students openly discuss topics such as stereotypes, culture, race, sexual orientation and drug use.

The students involved in the pilot class were handpicked last semester by teachers who got out of their classrooms and put their ears to the asphalt. "We picked students who were identified on campus as leaders by other students. But some of those kids were using their leadership skills in negative ways," said Bob Grover, assistant principal and class co-teacher.

That said, MOSAIC is hardly a group of made-for-Hollywood gang leaders mixing with rah-rah cheerleaders. Rather, the diversity of the group reflects the campus. Some of the students are academic achievers, and some get below-average grades; some are outgoing, and some are shy; some are wealthy, and some are not.

If the students can honor the differences within one classroom, the theory goes, they can do it on one campus.

"All MOSAIC has to do is reach three students, and a ripple effect takes over," Frankowski says.

The ripple effect has already begun. Mike Ho, a junior A.S.B. officer from Homestead High School, dropped by the Saturday afternoon workshop.

"I'll be honest," Ho said. "When I think of Fremont, I think of a 'ghetto school' with drive-bys and things like that."

Ho said that after witnessing MOSAIC in action, he's learned a few things about Fremont students and, more importantly, a few things about his own school. "Compared to this, my school is real clique."

Ho plans to sell the MOSAIC idea to fellow students at Homestead for next fall.

The idea for MOSAIC began after Grover and 12 students attended the annual Camp Anytown summer leadership retreat in 1996. Sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the five-day camp focuses on issues of diversity and tolerance. After Frankowski and 10 students returned from the camp in 1997, the students were eager to start a semester-long class at Fremont based on the camp's teachings. When their voluntary "Inter-Cultural Council" sank because the lunch-time meetings failed to generate student participation, Frankowski said she and Grover stepped in to provide "the academic time and space."

Frankowski was able to get a colleague to take on her social studies course to free up the class time, and Grover made the administrative adjustments to get the class rolling.

Since then, MOSAIC has had a profound effect on the students. In evaluation forms filled out at the end of last semester, students consistently credited the MOSAIC class with giving them the first taste of community on their campus.

According to one evaluation form written by a female senior, "I believe that MOSAIC is my high school experience." The student went on to write, "It has changed me as a person for the better and has helped me to love everyone, love my school and love myself."

To get the students to open up, Grover and Frankowski gave the students free rein over the topics explored in the class. Not surprisingly, exercises such as the Guess Your Race game are the fruits of such freedom. The game is a tool to learn about one another and discuss the stereotyping of races. Students have discussed gender, sexuality, racism--whatever challenges them.

"We realized we had to hand the power over to the students if we wanted them to trust us," Frankowski said. "Students know what's best for them."

MOSAIC is the only leadership class of its kind in California and possibly the country, but that may soon change.

After enthusiastic MOSAIC students pitched the concept of their class at a national conference of progressive educators last November in San Francisco, Grover was besieged by questions from other administrators. Requests for the blueprints of the class have been pouring in. Frankowski and Grover will fly to Kansas City, Mo., to give a formal presentation about the leadership class at the conference's next meeting in November.

At the end of the Guess Your Race game, a lanky soft-spoken student named Seth, who identifies himself as half Arabic and half white, stepped forward into the horseshoe.

He told his peers that diversity shouldn't work as an abrasive to cause friction, but rather as an adhesive that brings groups together.

That sent the students out of their gray folding chairs and cheering like mad.

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